Indiana, Utah gay marriage bans struck down

A U.S. appeals court struck down a gay marriage ban in conservative Utah on Wednesday and a federal judge rejected Indiana's prohibition of same-sex nuptials in the latest in a series of court rulings to allow gay couples to wed.

A U.S. appeals court struck down a gay marriage ban in conservative Utah on Wednesday and a federal judge rejected Indiana's prohibition of same-sex nuptials in the latest in a series of court rulings to allow gay couples to wed.

A U.S. appeals court struck down a gay marriage ban in conservative Utah on Wednesday and a federal judge rejected Indiana's prohibition of same-sex nuptials in the latest in a series of court rulings to allow gay couples to wed.

A decade ago, no U.S. state let gays marry, but challenges to state bans gathered pace since last June when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down parts of the federal Defense of Marriage Act, ruling that legally married same-sex couples were eligible for federal benefits.

"A state may not deny the issuance of a marriage license to two persons, or refuse to recognize their marriage, based solely upon the sex of the persons in the marriage union," the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said in its ruling on Utah.

Conservative and heavily Mormon, Utah briefly became the 18th U.S. state where marriage rights were extended to same-sex couples when a federal district judge ruled in December 2013 that a state ban on gay matrimony was unconstitutional.

That decision was put on hold pending appeals, but not before more than 1,300 gay and lesbian couples had tied the knot.

Separately, a U.S. federal judge struck down Indiana's ban on same-sex marriage as unconstitutional on Wednesday and ordered officials to start issuing marriage licenses.

U.S. District Court Chief Judge Richard Young said the state's ban violated the Constitution's due process and equal protect clauses in the Fourteenth Amendment.

Utah lawmakers who oppose gay marriage had argued that the ban, known as Amendment 3, was approved by voters and that same-sex marriages were new enough that evidence about their impact on families might not fully be known.

But the court said the state could not restrict the right to marry, or its recognition of marriage, "based on compliance with any set of parenting roles, or even parenting quality."

"We cannot embrace the contention that children raised by opposite-sex parents fare better than children raised by same-sex parents," it said in its ruling.

Responding to Utah's argument that same-sex marriage was too new to be rooted in tradition, it cited a 1967 Supreme Court ruling which invalidated laws prohibiting interracial marriage. "The right at issue was the 'freedom of choice to marry,'" the appeals court said, not tradition. And it said that while backers of Utah's ban said the right to marry was fundamental because it was linked to procreation, that argument was "undermined by the fact that individuals have a fundamental right to choose against reproduction."